News DIY Solid State Drive uses SD Cards

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/02/20/diy_ssd_sd_cards/

 

Pointless really. Isn't RAMDISK cheaper?

 

Maybe I'm reading that wrong but it doesn't quite seem right...

 

Hm, knock about $200 off the price and they might have something. Maybe.

 

to me "Parallel Port" is the old printer port. Do you mean that or IDE port?

This reminds me of the Matrox triplHead2Go - Nice idea but the list of compatible parts is too limited and the price for the adapter itself is Way too High.

 

I already have a CF to ide adaptor that I got from ebay for £2 and use to run one of my dos boxes which been a p200 insta boots (bios flashes 1s then im at dos prompt). This is posible becuse CF cards don't need conversion circuitry to comunicate over IDE and if givven a MBR show as a standard HD. This seems like a waste of money when cf cards would be so much cheaper to use (although you would still be better off with more ram if its performance and not an os drive you want).

 

What most people call IDE is actually PATA...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Attachment

 

if it provided alot more space for that price then maybe i'd be intrested

 

wouldn't one of the cheap compact flash to IDE adaptors such as: http://www.schrotthal.de/cf_ide_scsi/cf_ide_int_small--thumb.jpg work just as well if not better due to the ide structure of CF cards and be a fair bit cheaper?

 

But if you look up parallel port you get: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_port. Once upon a time external (zip) drives connected through that - I guess I'm just that old eh

 

Its an interesting idea, and bridges solid state technology with conventional storage tech. This is a good thing as it will make it easier for other companies to make better and more competitive products.

 

Personally, I'm more interested in the "Hybrid" drives MS have shown on Channel9 (ReadyDrive), where the HDD has a few GB "Flash Cache". When reading from the drive, it's transparent wether the data is in the flash or on a platter, but (Of course) this makes data access for the cached information much faster.

So, for example, just before restart the data on the flash is arranged so the files needed for the next boot are all cached, and after the machine is booted the most recently used applications are loaded into the flash so the system can run faster. It's also interesting for laptops (Where they were showing this off), 'cause it means the HDD can really go to sleep, with 99% of the data being kept in the flash (Including writes), so all those little writes back to the HDD for the page file and the like don't require HDD spinup, thus giving a laptop a longer battery life. And, of course, on shutdown the cached data can be written back to the platters.

I think, however, it'll be really interesting when you have a 500Gb HDD with a 50Gb "Flash Cache". Then pretty much the entire OS can be cached ready in the fast flash memory, and applications and the like can stream videos and data from the platters as and when. It'd also make for a 75% silent HTPC, where the hard-drive is only spun up for content, and is sitting idle and spun down the rest of the time.

 

In laptops, it wouldn't make sense to keep spinning down the HDD unless you know you aren't going to use it for a long time, because it requires quite a lot of energy to get the drive up to full speed (and time as well)

However, i guess you could spin the drive slowly (like 3k rpm) to save energy, however, whatever happens HDD's are going to drain power out of laptops quite a lot

i also have to wonder if this SD drive is actually cheaper then an iRam drive, and it certainly ain't beating any records for speed

on the subject of cheap ram - What happened to AMD's Z-Ram

 

this wont fly very high.

but the CF to IDE converter looks very nice.....

 

Agreed. CF to IDE is a better option then this.

 

I managed to pick one up for less than £5 including shipping, was planning on using it in a small media centre instead of a hard drive but might save it for when I upgrade to vista although at that price I may as well get more if I need them.

 

Nice Linux media centre on a 16GB flash drive in a VIA box...

 

yeah something like that, would like to do something with a passive cooled via board with the only moving part being the dvd drive, something completely silent in operation. Would be nice to run xp mce on it though simply because that is what i am used to.

 

Too expensive to fly, the CF adapters would be nicer.

 

HMM due to the finite write cycles of an SD/CF card, wouldn't the cards die pretty quickly if you were using them as virtual memory?

I remember reading an article where someone tried it in XP with a CF-IDE adaptor and the Card died within 4 minutes.

Don't know if vista is less intensive on virtual memory?